Thursday, May 28, 2015

Open Aerial Imagery

The OpenAerialMap has been reborn. Between November 2007 and December 2008 OpenAerialMap provided a collection of open-sourced aerial imagery. Unfortunately some problems with hosting and licensing caused the first iteration of OpenAerialMap to close in 2008.

Now however Humanitarian OSM Team (HOT) has restarted the OpenAerialMap project. OpenAerialMap will provide a central repository for imagery from satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and other aircraft. At the moment the map is a little sparse. There is quite a bit of aerial imagery in and around Kathmandu. If you search for Finland and zoom in on Helsinki you might be able to find a few more open aerial images.

Hopefully the huge growth in drone mapping in the last few years means that the time for a collection of open aerial imagery is here and HOT will be able to make a success of the new reborn OpenAerialMap.